Communicating a complex idea to a new audience is always a challenge. TED Curator Chris Anderson’s advice in TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking is extremely helpful. Let’s dive in to what he says.
When you want your audience to genuinely understand your concept, “You can only use the tools that your audience has access to,” he says. “If you start only with your language, your concepts, your assumptions, your values, you will fail. So instead, start with theirs. It’s only from that common ground that they can begin to build your idea inside their minds.”
Your vocabulary may hinder you. Find and use your audience’s vocabulary instead. Stepping outside of your cognitive comfort zone and into the minds of your audience is essential!
Understanding works when the new idea is “built as a hierarchy, with each layer supplying the elements that construct the next layer. We start with what we know, and we add bits piece by piece, with each part positioned by using already understood language, backed by metaphors and examples. The metaphors, perhaps literally, reveal the “shape” of the new concept so that the mind knows how to slot it in effectively. Without this shaping, the concepts can’t be put in place, so a key part of planning a talk is to have the balance right between the concepts you are introducing and the examples and metaphors needed to make them understandable.”
When you’re introducing a new idea and new vocabulary to an audience, you’ll need to go slower than you would like to go. Step by step really does mean step by step. You’ll need to test your metaphors on people outside of your field.
This is true not just for your words but for your slides too. TED’s Tom Rielly covers best practices for visuals in the book. Here is his advice on managing the cognitive load you ask your audience to undertake. “With a talk and slides you have two streams of cognitive output running in parallel. The speaker needs to blend both streams into a master mix. . . you must design where attention is going and make sure a high cognitive load on a slide doesn’t fight with what you’re saying,” he says.
His advice on when and how to use visuals is perfect. “When you think about it, it’s fairly simple. The main purpose of visuals can’t be to communicate words; your mouth is perfectly good at doing that. It’s to share things your mouth can’t do so well: photographs, video, animations, key data.”
Exactly. When you give a talk you are a guest in your audience’s brains. Be a lovely and helpful guest, not a demanding and exhausting one!
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